Let me clarify one thing before I wade into the specifics of Blair’s response. He signs off by saying I should “stop searching for a singular mechanism by which to prevent all that is ‘bad’ in Washington. No such force exists.” Hear, hear! I agree implicitly with that statement. And when I wrote about the Coalition to Reduce Spending’s new, supercharged pledge, I was praising it for recognizing that an “unintended consequence” of the Norquist pledge was to increase lawmakers’ reliance on deficit-spending.

Nonetheless I concluded the pledge is as misguided as Norquist’s:

For the record, I think a statutorily required balanced budget is a stupididea, and that anyone who signs this new pledge is terrifically insane and should therefore be disqualified from public office. Other than that, it’s a significant improvement on Norquist’s porous pledge.

Regarding that last line, I hope it’s clear to the reader that, like Robin Williams in “Good Will Hunting,” I was being “ironical.”

Back to Blair, who writes, “Galupo misses the mark, whether it is on purpose or by mistake, for a number of reasons. First, the Pledge is one protection for taxpayers against an increased financial burden of a growing federal government.” That’s a pretty astonishing assertion, when you think about it. 1) Why shouldn’t taxpayers be responsible for a “growing federal government”; and 2) Who else ultimately could be responsible for it? It is not, after all, a foreign government or some exogenous entity that has attached itself to the body politic.

The Pledge was not simply a means to “holding the line on taxes,” as Blair argues. It was supposed to “starve the beast” — that is, compel lawmakers to reduce federal outlays. Blair insists it’s not the Pledge’s fault that politicians keep spending: “It is but one tool in the shed of protections against a government that demands you fork over more of your hard earned cash to pay for its overspending problem.”

But what if Norquist’s tool hasn’t been just ineffectual? What if it actually made the problem worse?

This gets to the core of why I believe the Norquist pledge is an impediment to reform. Blair writes, “The biggest failure of Galupo’s critique of the Pledge is his attempt to make a connection between holding the line on taxes as an excuse for increased spending. By no logic are they connected.” Really? No logic at all? Ten dollars of spending for every six dollars in taxes hasn’t made big government feel artificially cheap, as George F. Will observed on ABC’s “This Week”?

If our political system then leads to decisions that roughly reflect voter references, the longer-term challenge for those of us who favor limited constitutional government is to try to convince voters to reduce their demand for the services financed by federal spending. Until that time, some increase in federal taxes appears to be a necessary part of a fiscal policy to balance the budget.

[C]onservatives who are serious about halting or reversing the dizzying Bush-era expansion of government—if there are any such conservatives, something of an open question these days—should stop defending Bush’s tax cuts. Instead, they should be talking about raising taxes to at least 19 percent of the GDP. Voters will not shrink Big Government until they feel the pinch of its true cost.

Third, the most effective constraint of all is to raise taxes and cut spending: exactly the sort of anti-deficit package that anti-tax conservatives pummeled the first President Bush and President Clinton for approving, and exactly the sort of package that the current President Bush and his anti-tax allies are sworn to block.

The conservative movement is in no position to accept or even acknowledge those implications, now that tax cutting has become the long pole in the Republican tent. Therein lies the element of tragedy. By turning a limited-government movement into an anti-tax movement, conservatism has effectively gone into business with the Big Government that it claims to oppose. It is not starving the beast. It is fueling the beast’s appetite. And the beast has a credit card.

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5 Responses to Debating the Merits of the Norquist Pledge

I think there are two currents operating here. The first is the general attitude of the US voter. It’s impossible to look at the aughts, the consumer credit boom, the mortgage frenzy, and think that there is something in the American psyche that, unlike many other cultures, is NOT afraid of debt. Yes, yes, there is a lot of talk about trillions and so on, but the average voter – that is, the average consumer – is addicted to debt in his or her personal life. Corporations were/are addicted to leverage in all aspects of their business. To be sure, there are times when debt is necessary for business, or personal, affairs – but that people were borrowing on home equity to fund vacations beggarred imagination. As it was in daily life, so it was in government – and it was a “conservative” government that told the American people deficits don’t matter; it was Republicans who launched programs and wars without funding them. And let’s be clear about one thing: when you spend a trillion dollars on a war, most of it on outsourced enterprise, and cut taxes at the same time, you are not trying to starve the beast; you are effectively bankrupting the polity, and getting acquiescence from the witting and willing taxpayer.

Until and unless the electorate is made aware of the total cost of government – and that includes defence spending, but also health care – you will not get your house in order. In Canada, the single-payer health care system brings the cost of health care to the home of the average taxpayer every second week – in the form of payroll health surcharges. We know what we pay and what we pay for. If we don’t like the one or the other, we will sack the government and get new services: if we want more, we will pay more; if we ask to pay less, we will receive less. That is how it should work, and not by cutting our payments and increasing our services.

The problem with Scott’s hypothesis is that the only tax increases that are being proposed is limited to the top 2% of income earners. That means that the remaining 98% will not feel any tax bite.

For the record, I am against all tax increases. The Federal government is bankrupt. It has $1.2T annual deficits, $16T in debt and $100T – $200T in unfunded liabilities. It is best to let the Federal government go into default.

By the way Scott, wouldn’t the best way for the public to understand how much government cost is to eliminate tax withholdings and require citizens to write a monthly check to the Federal government? Since the money is automatically deducted many – if not most – people don’t really know how much it cost to sustain government.

I actually agree that deficit spending makes government spending feel cheaper. In the same way that withholding (Marc above beat me to my analogy) makes taxes seem less onerous. I just refuse to concede that the way to respond to that is to make the taxpayers pay up for the government they are demanding. The way to respond is to cut the spending. I also resent the implication that raising taxes is the only “grown up” way to respond. Raising taxes is giving in. It’s politics as usual. It actually takes more leadership to cut programs people like than it does to raise taxes on some.